Origin

Jeans go back to the late 15th century, when the name jean fustian was used for a kind of heavy cotton cloth. It meant literally ‘fustian (a type of cloth) from Genoa’, a city in Italy. Jeans as we know them today date from the 1860s, when Levi Strauss ( 1829–1902), founder of the Levi's company, started to make durable denim work trousers which became popular with cowboys in the Wild West. Denim (late 17th century) was originally serge denim, from French serge de Nîmes ‘serge of Nîmes’, a city in the south of France. Serge is a woollen cloth, but modern denim is made of cotton.